Cancer: New drug may fight treatment resistance

Treatment resistance is a huge problem in cancer therapy and a major barrier to improving survival for many patients. Scientists have discovered that a solution might lie in a new drug that tackles cancer cells differently.

In the study paper, now published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, they report how the experimental drug showed promising results in animal models of both breast and colorectal cancer.

The drug targets a molecule that helps cancer cells to read instructions in their DNA. In fact, targeting this function has received attention lately as a new approach to treating cancer.

“Treatment-resistant tumors represent a significant threat for patients,” says study author Charles Coombes, who is a professor of medical oncology at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, “as once a cancer stops responding to treatments there is increasingly little clinicians can do.”

The new drug, called ICEC0942, has been licenced to a private company. They have developed it further and entered it into a phase I clinical trial that started treating people in November 2017.

The trial will assess the safety and effectiveness of the drug in humans. It is likely to be several years before it is approved for clinical use, however.

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